Teachers get lesson on new standards

Friday

Feb 24, 2012 at 2:00 AM

MONTICELLO — With a microphone dangling under her chin, Kate Gerson paced the front of the high school auditorium in sweater dress and heeled boots, prodding teachers to rethink the Gettysburg Address.

Meghan E. Murphy

MONTICELLO — With a microphone dangling under her chin, Kate Gerson paced the front of the high school auditorium in sweater dress and heeled boots, prodding teachers to rethink the Gettysburg Address.

She used the word "text" over and over again.

"There are lots of ways to go with this text ... . But rather than give away the answers, say: What is the text doing? What is the guy who wrote it doing? It's a short text..." she said.

Gerson, a senior fellow with the Regents Research Fund, is a state expert working on introducing the Common Core State Standards in New York schools.

Across the state, teachers are being trained on just how to use the Common Core approach. Gerson and the state's associate education commissioner for district services, Ken Slentz, visited the Monticello School District recently to help lay a foundation for the work ahead.

Adopted by 46 states nationwide, Common Core is a set of standards with grade-specific goals of what students are expected to know in math and English language arts. One English standard says second-graders should be able to "recount stories, including fables and folk tales from diverse cultures, and determine their central message, lesson, or moral."

To fulfill the state reform agenda, teachers must take these concepts and create lesson plans keeping the Common Core goals in mind. "It's about: 'What am I trying to teach here? Why did I choose this text?' And keeping you focused on it," Gerson told teachers in a lesson last week. The standards haven't grabbed as many headlines as the hot topic of evaluating teachers with test scores, but they have potential to transform what's going on in classrooms.

"There's a shift around what is curriculum; we're moving in a totally different direction," Ed Forgit, the Newburgh School District's assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, said in December. The Newburgh district brought a nationally recognized expert in to train teachers on a collaborative approach using the Common Core.

Local teachers generally seem to like the change, especially the aspect that it's spurring all educators to talk about how to improve in the classroom.

"They're supporting our understanding of what good teaching always has been," said Ellen Nutters, a Monticello School District teacher who admitted she entered the training a skeptic.

Yet, while Monticello teachers bubbled over in discussion with Gerson, they also took the opportunity to ask state leaders questions of their own. Nutters pressed Gerson on how teachers were expected to create complex and deep lessons in a short period of time.

"What I've noted is that in our quickness to take the Common Core, which is a very deep, substantial paradigm shift, we have been asked to come up with curriculum unit, upon unit, upon unit ..." Nutters said.

Gerson said the state isn't expecting "soup to nuts" curriculum this year.

"The commissioner is saying: 'Try it out; get smarter at it. This is hard work,' " Gerson said. "Pick a text and dive in, and build a unit around a text that you are devoted to, that you have to teach anyway, and teach it differently. That's what this year's about."

Math teacher Alan Devlin pointed out that in order to make these more difficult standards work, especially with high-needs students, there needs to be a lot of support for teachers.

"From our supervisors, we need a unified approach and commitment about how this is going to phase in," Devlin said. "My students lack basic skills in math and the work we're trying to do is above their heads.

"This whole approach, I believe it in 100 percent, but it's completely different from what we've been doing for the last nine years," Devlin said.